Using Fat to Turbo-Charge Intracellular Parasite Growth

Early during infection, the malaria parasite invades liver cells and undergoes robust replication, generating thousands of new parasites within days. In this issue of Cell Host & Microbe, Itoe et al. (2014) show that parasite replication in the liver depends on the synthesis of host bulk phospholipids, which are incorporated into the expanding parasite and surrounding vacuolar membranes